Tuesday 28 February 2023
I spent too much time yesterday dwelling on ‘stuff’, both in terms of this move and my work and income. Regarding the move, fortunately it’s not the case that I’m questioning whether it was the right thing to do, moving somewhere so far removed from pretty much everything that is familiar to me. Similarly, despite all the issues we’ve had with heating and water, it’s nothing to do with the house itself, I love the house and feel that it looks after us. An unexpected feeling, but it does feel safe.
In a way, I think what I’ve been fretting about – and I’m trying to separate my work/income issues because they are, at least for now, largely unrelated – is the extent to which I wasn’t prepared for life here, even though I sort of thought we were. Chris and I talked a lot about the pros and cons of living out here before we moved. I wrote a blog, which I haven’t published, in the lead-up to moving; it was predominantly about my/our expectations and concerns. As you’d hope, our thoughts did weigh more heavily on the pros side of things, but the anticipated stresses were probably what we focused on and talked about more often.
Despite feeling fairly well-prepared – I remember that animal sounds, any sounds actually, featured heavily in our concerns – life here is less like my expectations than I think I realised until around about now, this minute, thinking more rationally about my weird head-space day yesterday. I am saying this as neither a positive nor a negative, more a fact, I suppose.
A big issue for me, someone who has always (I say “always” but for at least the last ten years and significantly more since my first Fitbit seven years ago and my 10,000 steps daily goal/obsession) found and made time for walks, is that I rarely walk 10,000 steps. In part, testament to how much I love this house and its surroundings, I love looking out the window. I don’t feel a need for a change of scene because all the beautiful outdoorsy stuff can be seen from the comfort of indoors. To do 10,000 steps from out the front door would require outdoorsy footwear and either walking along forestry tracks or the road. To walk on the road would mean a linear rather than circular walk and, though there isn’t a lot of traffic, it’s the kind of road you’d want to move to the edge of for passing vehicles, which slows you down. The forestry tracks are straightforward to walk on but I don’t always want to walk up and down and quite a few end abruptly, so you have to turn back. I am annoying myself thinking like this about walking, it feels like I’m making pathetic excuses. I would never have expected to feel like this. When I think about a beautiful place like this, I want to walk somewhere and just sit and admire the view. It would appear that to walk, I’m a city walker. I had no idea.
However, it’s not just about not walking so much, it’s about not going outdoors as much too. I look out the window in London and I want to go outdoors. Maybe it’s a space issue, that there is a lot less space in our flat in London than in our house here. Here, maybe I just don’t feel the need to get some space around me by going outside. But I do think it is important to spend time outdoors. Every time I go outside here, I’m always glad I made the effort to go out. Maybe gardening in April will be the thing that gets me out, a different kind of exercise. I used to average about 13,000 steps a day, every day, in London and that was my exercise. I also worry a bit about a lot less exercise here by not walking much, but gardening would be a form of exercise.
So vitamin D deficiency and lack of exercise. These are not things I even contemplated before we moved here, though in the first few weeks I felt over-exercised from all the lifting and moving.
I’m going to leave things there and maybe return to the unexpected elements of life out here another day.
As my daily ‘home improvement’ for yesterday, I stuck up a couple of pictures, including a poster in the downstairs loo. It felt delightfully 1990s putting up a poster with ‘multi-purpose tack’.
I checked the wildlife cameras; a few distant hares and something that was either the back legs of a hare at full stretch or a short deer. And this deer.
